Tompkins Square
2007
Spencer Moore
About This Album
Spencer Moore's debut album was a long time coming. Seventy-plus years coming, to be exact, and it might not have happened at all if Josh Rosenthal, who runs Tompkins Square Records, hadn't attended a retrospective exhibition of photographs taken by the legendary Alan Lomax. Rosenthal was particularly struck by a photo of a man shown singing and playing guitar against a tobacco field backdrop, a photo, it turned out, that was taken by Lomax in 1959 at a field recording session he was doing of a young tobacco farmer named Spencer Moore (several of the tracks recorded that day ended up as part of Lomax's Southern Journey project). Rosenthal proceeded to track down Moore, who by this time was 87-years-old and retired, at his home in Chilhowie, VA, and on June 2006, ran tape on the elderly singer. The resulting spare and acoustic Spencer Moore album is startlingly refreshing for its complete lack of pretense. Moore isn't a great guitar player, and his singing is frequently pitch challenged, and none of the 14 tracks presented on the album have a snowball's chance in hell of being played on a commercial radio station, but the utter simplicity and honesty of the whole record makes it seem almost radically conceived in a world full of loops, drum samples, heavy compression, and quick edit market campaigns.
Track List (try tracks 1,5,6,7,9,10,11,12 and 13)

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